(UK/France/Canada/Belgium, 107 min.)
Dir. Saul Dibb, Writ. Matt Charman, Saul Dibb
Starring: Michelle Williams, Kristin Scott Thomas, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ruth Wilson, Sam
Riley, Margot Robbie
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| Matthias Schoenaerts and Michelle Williams in Suite Française. eOne Films. |
Some books have baggage. Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française presents an odd
conundrum for adaptation since it isn’t a Herculean maze of prose that deems
some novels “unfilmable.” Suite Française
is a relatively contained book—two parts plus some invaluable appendices—and
the prose is clear, descriptive, and virtually filmable as written. The tricky
part is that Némirovsky never finished the book because she died in Auschwitz
in 1942 when only two of the planned five parts of Suite Française were drafted. Even her own death appears as an
editorial note amidst the chronological correspondence of an appendix that
illuminates how this unfinished work found publication after sixty years of
hiding.
Perhaps the story behind Suite
Française is simply more interesting than the book itself, and the
adaptation therefore struggles to unpack the weight it brings to the screen. Suite Française, the movie, has a significant legacy to uphold. While it somewhat
satisfyingly dramatizes the melodrama of some of Némirovsky’s novel, the film
ultimately misses a terrific opportunity to be in dialogue with book and turn
this adaptation into art.
This disappointing, but nevertheless pleasing, adaptation comes
in a handsome package by writer/director Saul Dibb (The Duchess) and co-writer Matt Charman. Suite Française takes the second part of Némirovsky’s book
(“Dolce”), which presents an episode in the town of Bussy, which is finally
feeling the effects of German occupation when a mass exodus of Parisians comes
to town and the townspeople are forced to billet Nazi soldiers who storm the
town. Lucille Angellier (Michelle Williams) and her cranky mother-in-law
(Kristin Scott Thomas) get the pleasure of housing an officer named Bruno
(Matthias Schoenaerts), who causes Lucille to blush even though her husband’s
away fighting the Germans. Forbidden romance ensues as the townspeople resist
the Nazi Occupation and Lucille discovers that siding up close to the enemy is
the best bad idea in town.
Suite Française, a
poetic expression of resistance, becomes a soap opera on the screen as Lucille flirts
with her conflicted desires and her neighbours hiss that she’s a Nazi whore
while also exploiting her friendliness with Bruno to seek favours for which
they’re too weak to ask. Suite Française,
however, offers perfectly good wartime
soapsuds. The drama remains consistently watchable as the townspeople,
including the Labaries (Sam Riley and Ruth Wilson), a farming couple that
receives a particularly nasty Nazi officer; sweaty Celine (Margot Robbie), who
confronts the same desires that Lucille hides; and the Viscount and Viscountess
de Montmort (Lambert Wilson and Harriet Walter), who epitomize the entitlement
of the upper class, all sneak around at night and melodramatically flirt with
love and death. The cinematography by Eduard Grau is serves the period and
soapiness alike, while the music by Rael Jones ensures that Suite Française swoons.
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| Kristin Scott Thomas in Suite Française. eOne Films. |
Williams conveys Lucille’s emotional conflict nicely and
subtly, although she struggles with the accent somewhat, and she carries the
melodrama smartly and intimately. Scott Thomas stands out in the respectable
ensemble as Madame Angellier offers a deliciously crotchety resister who
refuses to march to German time and remains resolute in her ways to uphold the
class system by collecting rent from her tenants and hoarding all the groceries
she can. The elder Angellier has moments of perfectly calculated brittleness
that humanize a character holding on to the last shards of a life that seems to
be falling apart. The few moments where Scott Thomas breaks her character’s
shell are both dramatic highlights and moments of comic relief—and reminders
that anyone can do the right thing in the end. The Angelliers are arguably the
most readily cinematic of Némirovsky’s characters.
Suite Française omits
the book’s first half (“Storm in June”), although a snippet of newsreel footage
contextualizes the fall of Paris, while two of the part’s central
characters—Mr. and Mme. Michaud—cross paths with Lucy and Madame Angellier in
the film’s riveting opening that sees Nazi bombers attack the Parisians
marching away from the city. (Wilson’s Madeline Labarie also connects the two
halves of the book with the charity she offers to refugees.) The lack of the
first half of the two-part structure somewhat dulls Suite Française’s incisively droll take on the aristocracy, but
Dibb and Chartrand’s adaptation nevertheless captures the coldness of class
divides that complicate survival in war time. The adaptation intertwines the
dramatic weight of Lucy’s attraction to Bruno with her allegiance to the town
as the Montmorts clash with the Labaries and, in turn, make Bussy a microcosm
for power struggles around Europe in the Nazi occupation.
The film most notably falters, however, by offering
narrative closure for Lucy’s story as the drama of Suite Française ends with a move towards Paris. The resolution
proves unsatisfying both narratively and emotionally because it cleanses a
story that did not end well. One significance of Némirovsky’s death for Suite Française, the book, is that
“Dolce” ends with a departure, but with no real sense of an ending. The overall
lack of resolution mixes with a grain of optimism in the image of German
soldiers departing Bussy. Lucille doesn’t know how the war is going to end when
“Dolce” gets its final page, and the film’s clunky voiceover that recalls the
end of the war feels inappropriate whereas the novel’s speculation of where the
war might lead is compelling and unsettling alike s it puts the reader in the
headspace of a writer who tried to imagine an end to the war, but never lived
to see it. The openness poignantly underscores the collective loss of the war
through the abrupt departure of the author and the incompleteness of her work.
The film tries to honour the author’s memory by adding a few post-script title
cards that note Némirovsky’s death prior to the book’s completion, but these
additional notes ultimately try to add emotional currency in the posthumous
legacy of Suite Française and of the
voice that outlived the Holocaust. It’s an important note that isn’t of service
to the film.
The legacy of Suite
Française is so integral to the book itself that Némirovsky truly needs to
be an ever-present ghost in the film for the adaptation to work. The film
demands a structure akin to The Hours
that makes Némirovsky a character in the film who crafts these movements of a
musical composition (as she planned) that ultimately hang in the air without a
fermata. Such an adaptation isn’t a difficult task since films such as Adaptation., The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or The Hours are varying works that make the artistic process part of
the film’s dramatic energy. The film might have even furthered the movements of
Némirovsky’s composition (which gets a nice motif in the piece that Bruno
crafts throughout the film) by using the author’s rise from the ashes to
further the story of Némirovsky’s book, as Suite
Française continues to write a remarkable story long after the her death.
What comes to the screen in this Suite
Française is a mildly satisfying adaptation, but it’s also a fascinating
case study of the layers of meaning that live between the words of the text
itself.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Suite Française screens in Ottawa at The ByTowne until July 23rd
and in Toronto at TIFF Lightbox.
